Wednesday, 26 April 2017

1-reading with envy in today's music press
that tickets to see The Grateful Dead
in London forty five years ago, 1972,
cost a trifling £1 and wondering...
What happened the price of legendary live music?

2-Getting leaflets for stair lifts for the elderly
through your letter box, and wondering.
which of your friends could do with one most,
were they rich enough to be able to afford it.

3-Come the latest election preferring humour
over genuine news from the campaign trail.
There is a leavening with the laughter of recognition
that no serious politician can get anywhere near,
an acceptance of the absurdity of the human condition.

Monday, 24 April 2017

Benjamin Franklin is the person most credited
with the invention of bi-focal glasses,
the better to both see clearer at a distance
and read legal and social texts close up.

Was this his greatest gift to the presidents
who followed him? A way of losing the focus
in their political vision, from their prescription
needing renewal. This unclear view of society
was what enabled them to pursue legal arguments
with pin sharp logic with which to perpetuate
the inferior status of non-whites and immigrants.

The clearest vision was always for the few
and they were best expressed with economy,
the better to avoid the broader implications.

Those who read and wrote most
were The Few who owned everything,
particularly the deeds of the state
on which all ownership was based
which they read with the close part
of their bifocal lenses, whilst being blind
to the bigger world around them.

Wednesday, 19 April 2017

For the woman who understands science
a diamond will always be worth more
than then gentlemen who gives them to her.
The diamonds will be older and tougher
than the man who gave them, and will age,
and retain their monetary value, better too.

Monday, 17 April 2017

When governments tell their voters
'It is official; the latest recession is over'
generally the polulus know to not trust them.

The only question to ask is 'How many folks
will openly admit they disbelieve the powers that be?',
knowing that the poor accept their relative poverty
and their acceptance remains the base of society,
and nobody knows how to be honest about money.

Tuesday, 11 April 2017

that we consider 'normal' or accptable, are many.
The major signals being not just sentience,
but autonomy among your own kind
and with other species, via a currency
and a community with collective values.

If ever we found such a life
in some technology we'd made
how long would it be before
we actively recognized it?

Sunday, 9 April 2017

(noun) - the state of being where however much you have,
it is never enough. And what you have never gives you the sense of life
that might persuade you to get more from life by having less, in future.

Saturday, 8 April 2017

I have long kept watch
on those who appear to act
as if they are in actual power.

The longer I watched
the more I wondered
at was the nature of the force
that kept them there?

Now I think I know
-the leader speak the lines
written for them by the popular press
-well behind the scenes,
The press then amplify
what the leader has said,
as though the leader
wrote their own lines
when many folk can guess
that they didn't,

For as long as consumers pay
for this back room spin operation
because they buy the products
that support the newspapers,
through advertising, then democracy
will continue the be engineered.

Thursday, 6 April 2017

Before booking into a tax deductable clinic,
for his sex addiction a famous american actor
was asked by a court to account his frequent use
of (female) prostitutes. He had a choice...

His defense was rather legalistic
'I paid them to leave, not for any good
they do whilst they are in my company'.

Many a husband who found more life
in the pubs that they stayed in every day
than in the house they paid for
would say similar to that actor.

They would say of their children and wife
'Paying for the family and house
-which I owned outright-did not mean
that I wanted to own those things,
they simply had to be owned by somebody.
Nor did I see myself as investor in their lives,
in which shared no common values.... '.

Tuesday, 4 April 2017

I have often heard the educated
that other people's educations
has wrung their brains clean of all thought,
But what they learnt in school
still did less than half the damage
that watching television does....